While planning a trip to Savannah, Georgia to visit my daughter, Ryan Belmore, WUN publisher, and I mused about possible Rhode Island/Savannah connections. None readily came to mind.
But they are there.
In the historic cemeteries. artists and soldiers, young children and others buried and remembered. Their stories are told on markers near burial vaults, and headstones in Colonial Park and Bonaventure Cemeteries.
Along a brick wall, headstones, many broken, others displaced, all tracing connections to many east coast states, families that moved south. Some are children of only a few months old who died at a time when infant mortality was said to be as high as 50 percent. Many were victims of Savannah’s great Yellow Fever epidemic of 1820.
Colonial Park is a six-acre cemetery in the heart of Savannah’s historic district that was opened in 1750 and closed in 1853.
Bonaventure is a sprawling one hundred acre plus park, on the site of Bonaventure Plantation. There old tree lined roadways, lined with thousands of azalea bushes and unique sculptures signifying the resting place for many notable people. It was purchased for a private cemetery in 1846 and became a public cemetery in 1907.
Several former Rhode Islanders are buried in Bonaventure, but perhaps the most famous is buried at neither Bonaventure nor Colonial.
Major General Nathanial Greene was born in Potowomut in Rhode Island and became a key figure in the American Revolutionary War, renowned for his successful campaign in the south, after taking over command of the Southern Army. While in Rhode Island he helped “raise” the Kentish Guard and would become George Washington’s most trusted subordinate.
Following the war, Greene was given a plantation, “Mulberry Grove” by the people of Georgia, which is where he died in 1786 at the age of 43 from complications of heat stroke.
You can visit the Nathaniel Greene Homestead in Coventry, and his burial site now beneath a monument dedicated to him at Johnson Square in Savannah. Greene was buried in the Graham Family Tomb in Colonial Park in 1786. His remains were moved to Johnson Square in Savannah in 1902 beneath a monument erected in his memory.
Edward Greene Malbone was born in Newport, moved to Providence and traveled extensively, “widely admired by both American and British artists” as a miniaturist. His career lasted only 12 years, from when he was 17 until his death in 1807 from tuberculosis. He was buried in Colonial Park.
Bonaventure lists the names of Champlin, Cranston, Ellery and Franklin among former Rhode Islanders buried there.
The most famous sculpture in Bonaventure is of six-year-old Gracie Watson, who died suddenly on April 22, 1889, after being photographed in her new Easter attire. The sculpture was the work of German born sculptor John Walz, who is also buried in Bonaventure.
